DIY Seed Envelopes 101

Seed envelopes can come in a variety of different styles, colors, and designs. But who knew that custom seed envelopes were super easy to make yourself? With a color printer, a pair of scissors, a glue stick, and a pen, you can be on your way to tailored seed envelopes for sharing with your friends.

The Smithsonian has compiled a very large library of vintage seed catalogs, which make fantastic and creative covers for your homemade envelopes. However, any pretty picture will do! TIP: Before you place all of your seeds in your finished envelope, be sure that you label it! It can be difficult to try to label your seed envelopes once that have been filled with seeds.

Turn the paper over so that the picture is face down, and fold the square into thirds horizontally, so that there are three separate panels. Step 3:

Fold the edges over one another, and glue down the top flap to the bottom flap, creating an envelope with two open sides. Then, fold the corners in and bend the bottom edge up. Glue this flap onto the main body, sealing the bottom of the envelope permanently.

Step 4:

Fold the top edge in a similar manner, but don’t glue it closed. Instead, let the fold hold itself closed after the seeds have been placed inside. If you want to alter the size of the seed envelope, you can cut it horizontally at this step before you make the final fold on the top.

Place your seeds inside and you’re ready to go! Here is a slideshow of the instructions to take with you!

Replies to This Discussion

Nice ideas but an even more appropriate technology version of this, which prevents the use of virgin paper, color ink, power to run the printer, double sided tape (which is difficult to find and very expensive where I am) is to simply reuse a sheet of paper or newsprint cut to the right shape and use some simple glue ( flour/water).

Imagine you have no power and stores are 100 miles away and you'll start thinking like this!

The folded paper version is excellent, however! not even glue is necessary!

I often make little seed envelopes just by folding a small piece of paper and tucking one side into the other. Difficult to explain, easy to do... kind of like the example above. But, I do like the more standard looking ones, even though they do use up resources.